I needed to recover an Exchange 2007 mailbox using DPM 2012 recently and thought I would share with you the steps I took.
Although there have been many – very good – advances made in System Center Data Protection Manager 2012, the Exchange Item Level Recovery is still in need of some work.
One Pre-Requisite is to have a Recovery Storage Group with an available Database to restore to;
Use Exchange Powershell;
- Create a Recovery Storage Group;
New-StorageGroup –Server ServerName –Name “Recovery Storage Group” –systemFolderPath “Path” –LogFolderPath “Path” –Recovery
- Create the Recovery Database;
New-MailboxDatabase –MailboxDatabaseToRecover “Mailbox Database Name” –StorageGroup “Recovery Storage Group” –EDBFilePath “Path\Mailbox Database.edb”
- Allow restore for recovery storage group;
Set-MailboxDatabase -Identity “Recovery Storage Group\Mailbox Database” -AllowFileRestore $true
Then Using DPM 2012;
In the Recovery Pane of DPM 2012 filter your recovery items by the name of your Exchange server.
Then drill down to the relevant Storage Group and select the relevant Mailbox Database.
Then type into the search box the name of the Mailbox you want to recover.
Right click the Mailbox and select Recover.
Follow the steps of the Recovery Wizard;
Review the Recovery Selection
Select where you want to restore the Mailbox, you can restore it to a Recovery Storage Group Database or simply to a Network Folder to import the Mailbox Manually. Or you can copy it to tape for off-site archiving or transportation.
Specify your Restore Location
Specify relevant options;
The SAN Recovery option gives the following explanation……
Before you can recover data on a SAN using hardware snapshots, you must have the following: A SAN where hardware snapshot functionality is enabled; a SAN with the capability to create a clone and split a clone to make it writable, and the protected computer and the DPM server connected to the same SAN.
Check the Summary Information and Click Restore.
You can watch the restore in real-time or go away and have a coffee and come back later, this will be dependant upon the Mailbox Database size.
Once the restore has completed you can go back to Exchange Powershell;
- Mount the recovery database;
Mount-Database –Identity “Recovery Storage Group\Mailbox Database”
- Restore the Mailbox;
Restore-Mailbox -RSGMailbox ‘Recovered Mailbox Name’ -RSGDatabase ‘Recovery Storage Group\Database Name’ -id ‘Target Mailbox Name’ -TargetFolder ‘Folder to Restore to’
If you get the following error;
Error occurred in the step: Moving messages. This mailbox exceeded t he maximum number of corrupted items specified for this move mailbox operation. , error code: -1056749110
use the BadItemLimit parameter;
Restore-Mailbox -RSGMailbox ‘Recovered Mailbox Name’ -RSGDatabase ‘Recovery Storage Group\Database Name’ -id ‘Target Mailbox Name’ -TargetFolder ‘Folder to Restore to’ -BadItemLimit 1000
Once the restore has completed, check that all is well with the target mailbox and then we can discard the Recovery Database if it is no longer needed.
- Dismount the recovery database;
Dismount-Database -Identity “Recovery Storage Group\Mailbox Database”
- Delete the recovery storage group
Remove-MailboxDatabase -Identity “Recovery Storage Group\Mailbox Database”